By Dr. John Silber,* Right to Read Report, March 1994

October 1994 –  Let me begin with what may seem to be a truism: the most important duty of our schools is to teach all students to read and write. This is a truism only in the sense that it is obviously true. But unfortunately it is not a truism in the sense that it does not need saying, because as a matter of tragic fact our schools fail to teach many of their students to read and write.

If you ask the Census Bureau, you will be told that 95% of Americans are literate. This figure is obtained through an appallingly dishonest process. The Census Bureau counts as literate anyone who attends school through the fifth grade, entirely without regard to whether he or she can read or write. When we look at the actual performance of adult Americans, we find that the truth is grim indeed.

A recent major study commissioned by the federal government reports that almost half of adult Americans lack the literacy needed to write a letter correcting a billing error. This means that nearly half of Americans are, in essence, uneducated. In fact, they are also left uneducable, for if their schools fail to teach them to read and write, they cannot teach them anything else and, worst of all, they rob them of the ability to learn on their own. Can anyone doubt that not being able to read makes school devastatingly boring and powerfully encourages dropping out?

A student who is fully literate, by contrast, is capable not merely of participating in the structured education provided by a curriculum and a classroom, but also of further independent self-education.

And the quality of self-education is not limited by whatever inadequacies may exist in the classroom. The education afforded Abraham Lincoln in the frontier schools was both erratic and primitive. But Lincoln was taught to read and write, and he took it from there; he educated himself in geometry, literature and law by reading on his own.

The millions of American children who are not taught to read lose the opportunity for education of any sort. They are disqualified for any but the least attractive and worst-paying jobs in the economy. They are unable to participate in their society and must exist, at best, as third-class citizens. Their inability and dependency cripple the country’s ability to compete in a global and interdependent economy.

If our schools fail to teach our children to read and write, they fail essentially and inexcusably. If as many as 20% of the surgical patients at a hospital died on the operating table, that hospital would be shut down and might never reopen. But the schools are not held accountable for a far worse rate of failure.

This failure is neither tolerable nor inevitable. We must realize that our high illiteracy rates are an American disease. In other English-speaking countries, from England to Jamaica to New Zealand, any child of at least ordinary intelligence becomes literate in the earliest school years and thus enabled to complete the later stages and to lead a fulfilled life in a modern society.

This was once the case in the United States. During World War II, for example, the armed forces learned through testing that only 9% of inductees were illiterate; and most of these had never gone to school. But by 1964, 20% of inductees – most of whom had gone to school – were illiterate. And another 20% were only marginally literate.

Sixty years ago, the public would have been puzzled by the title of a book called Why Johnny Can’t Read. But by 1955, when Rudolf Flesch used the title, everyone knew what he meant.

And one group in America has suffered disproportionately from our failure to teach literacy. One of the most appalling declines in literacy has occurred among African-Americans over 14. In 1930, over 80% of African-Americans could read. In 1990, however, only 56% of African-Americans over 14 could read! This decline is the more appalling when we consider that between 1930 and 1990, the nation made a major commitment to educating black children on terms of equality with white children. If our schools were performing competently, the proportion of literate blacks would have increased sharply.

What happened to America? The answer is quite clear. The teaching of reading, which had once been the province of elementary school teachers was delivered into the hands of so-called “experts” in the schools of education. And such experts recoil at the old maxim “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” They proceed with a different and perverse maxim: “If it works in practice, it must be wrong in theory.” Inflamed by their dogmatism, they rejected the traditional use of phonetics in teaching reading, and replaced it with word-recognition, often called “look-see.”

Because they correctly observed that English spelling is not as completely phonetic as that of Italian, Spanish or German, they missed the far more important point that English is written phonetically. They proceeded to teach reading as if English were Chinese, a language in which the written characters give no clue whatever to the sounds of the words.

To treat English as if it were Chinese requires first-grade students who enter school with an oral vocabulary of from three to six thousand words to memorize the spelling of these thousands of words. Had they been taught the phonetic method, after learning a few hundred words they could deduce by phonetic techniques the pronunciation of thousands. A child who has learned to sound the letters of the alphabet can move quickly from the simple word bat to read cat, fat, hat, mat, pat, rat, sat, and so on.

The results of the non-phonetic approach were, predictably, disastrous. Since the theory was utterly wrong-headed, the teachers forced to use it were bound to fail with many of their pupils. We must not blame the teachers for this failure but those educationists who imposed methods bound to fail.

The most remarkable feature of the crisis in literacy is the fact that we stand for it. We would be less forgiving in almost any other area. If the [transit authority] came up with the cock-eyed theory that red is an improper color for mass transit and consequently closed down the Red Line, those responsible would be promptly removed.

But we accept the fundamental failure of our schools in developing literacy. We continue school committees and superintendents in office and we continue to provide funding for schools that fail in their most elemental duty. And so of course the failure goes on with our acquiescence.

It appears that our schools are not persuaded by simple self-respect to do the job for which they were created. The International Reading Association, the professional organization of teachers of reading, holds the position that phonics and look-see are equally satisfactory methods for teaching reading. This is like saying that radar and astrology are equally satisfactory techniques for predicting the weather. The dogmatic denial of error does not hide the tragic consequences of error. It is clear that the educational establishment ignores the disastrous results they produce.

We can see how little they understand the crisis they have brought upon us when we consider a recent proposal by the Commission on Reading of the National Council of Teachers of English to replace the phrase “standard English” with “privileged English.” That is, African-American and Hispanic children are to be kept in a linguistic ghetto separate from the American mainstream. Denied standard English as a privileged dialect, schoolchildren are denied the language of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, of Mark Twain and Ralph Ellison, of W.E.B. Dubois and Carl Sandburg. For their language is a birthright of all American children, one that no one has the right to deny. The fact is, moreover, that standard English does confer privileges on its users, and these privileges must be available to every child. That is what equality of opportunity means.

Let me propose a means for ending the failure and assuring all our children the birthright of language that makes us human. We must establish a reasonable criterion for success in teaching reading and writing and tie state aid to meeting the criterion. Let us say that no school system can receive state aid unless 90% of its fourth-grade students read and write at the fourth-grade level.

There is, of course, an analogous problem with the third “R.” The literacy study I cited earlier also reports that nearly half of the adults surveyed were unable to calculate travel times using printed bus schedules. Evidence abounds that large numbers of Americans do not know enough arithmetic to balance a checkbook.

And here too the educationists have brought disaster upon us through the adoption of a fashionable theory without regard to results. In this case, the fad was “new math,” deriving from set theory, which is perfectly useful in its place, that is, in higher mathematics. But it is as hostile to success in ciphering as look-see is to success in reading. Again, the educationist fixes a clock that was not broken, and millions of Americans are paying the price for their pretentious folly, deprived of the ability to work with numbers.

About the only good news in the teaching of mathematics is that the schools of Nebraska, a state which has rejected the New Math and gone back to traditional curricula, starting with counting sticks, are now fourth in the nation in mathematics.

And so I propose that adequate performance on math scores in the fourth grade be made another requirement for state funding. In the absence of any recognition by the schools that they are failing to teach arithmetic as well as reading and writing, drastic action will be required to get their attention.

I do not believe that reading, writing and arithmetic constitute an adequate curriculum for our schools. But they are prerequisites for any curriculum at all. In focusing my attention, and I hope yours, on these elementary issues, I am adopting the philosophy of the emergency room. We must stabilize the vital signs before considering long-term treatment. And we should have no doubt that judged by their performance, our schools are candidates for the emergency room.  

* Dr. Silber gave these remarks to the Massachusetts Commission on the Common Core of Learning, Gardner Auditorium, The State House, January 12, 1994.